just like honey
by lenina20
Summary: Post 5x11. Caroline spends the first century of her eternity waiting for Klaus to break a promise.


**hey guys ;)**

* * *

**[one]**

**.-.**

She can only handle this if _forever_ not an option.

If (at last)—_forever_ no longer factors in and she can stop feeling so goddamned _terrified_, you know?

* * *

Her pretty eyes wrinkled, her forehead creased, she whispers kind of in a hurry, kind of pretending like no one can hear. _Bonnie_, she swallows—

_I did a bad thing._

* * *

"… but I'm _not_ in love with Klaus. I don't want him in my life. I don't want to _ever_—"

"Then why did you sleep with him?" Elena's big brown eyes swell with unshed tears; not of anger but of heartache. Because she _loves_ Damon, can't Caroline just understand—?

Words tumble out of her lips before she even thinks of what she's saying. "I slept with him because he promised he'd leave. He promised that I'd never see him again if I was—" Metaphorically, only, she claps her hands over mouth. Bites her tongue until she tastes blood and averts her eyes from the bitter judgement in Elena's eyes. Because of course she _didn't_—

"You slept with him so he'd leave you alone?"

"No! No!" No, of course she didn't do _that_. That wasn't what he said. What she said. _Good_. How he smirked. How she smiled, so wide and momentarily ecstatic, bursting with the surge of freedom and goddamned freaking _happiness_. "He was leaving! He was leaving anyway, his entire life is in New Orleans. He isn't coming back—no matter what. And I'm never going to see him again, so you know? No harm done. I thought that, if I only had that one time, that one chance—"

"To be honest about how you feel?" Elena's smile wrenches out Caroline's madly-beating heart. "About what you truly want?"

_No_—

She shakes her head, clenches her fists, stomps her foot, because _no no no no no no_.

Her voice is a tiny mumbling thread of terror when she repeats, eyelids clutched almost painfully to block out the salt of her tears. "I don't want Klaus in my life."

Not now. Not_ ever_.

She opens her big sad eyes to watch Elena look away, set her jaw, flare her nostrils and swallow her own tears. "You do want him, Caroline. You're just _ashamed_."

No, she is not—

* * *

She is _not_ ashamed, but—

She is so _scared_.

* * *

(Yes, she totally gets the irony, shut _the hell_ up, okay?

It was always not so much meant for forever, as _about_ forever. _You can have a thousand more birthday_s_, Caroline_? You think she has forgotten that?

Well, she freaking hasn't.

She hasn't forgotten a _thing_ but she has to pretend—she's so very good at that, it's almost effortless. Self-denial is an art form, after all.

(Klaus—

Klaus is many things. One of those, an artist. He painted a stupid drawing once, thick old paper and the dry smell of charcoal giving shape to her stupid face and the stupid face of a stupid horse.)

Shut _the hell_ up.

It's only if she pretends that she won't live forever that she can go on pretend-breathing, making it as if she were alive, her heart beating, rushing to the finish line, her expiration date—instead of just _lingering_,an adequately-shaped mass of on-the-verge-of-rotting flesh delicately assembled around the ever-growing pit in her stomach, that opens wider and wider by the second, threatening to eat her whole and make her disappear.)

* * *

"I never promised I wouldn't call, love."

She shuts her eyes tight, swallows her rugged breath, wills herself to stop shaking so that she can at least hold the phone over her ear without descending into complete meltdown-mode. _Fuck you_, she bites against her tongue, the memory of _his_ tongue pressed to the roof of her mouth hot and tangible as if he was here right now, pinning her down on a bed of putrid dead leaves.

The taste of her own blood is sharp and unexpected. She hasn't even noticed the burn in her gums, stretched and ripped apart by the piercing bite of her elongating fangs.

She knows that if she tried to speak, only a feral hiss would come out.

"Just wanted to wish you a happy graduation, love." His voice is an age-old caress, stirring up the violence contained in her veins, drawing red-and-blue, fizzling cobwebs over her cheekbones. "For old time's sake."

She can't say anything back to his velvet voice stroking the shell of her ear.

She wants to bite him so _hard_.

* * *

It's been four _fucking_ years, you fucking _asshole_.

* * *

**[two]**

**.-.**

Krakow is exactly 5446.20 miles away from New Orleans—

* * *

—but only 400 miles north from the town where his family originally came from.

How do you figure? Where Esther and Mikael were born and got married and had their first litter of dead children. Before they move away and got on a boat and landed a couple dozens miles from her hometown—

—4566.80 miles away from the comfy read IKEA couch planted right in the middle of her small _Stare Miasto_ apartment.

* * *

Caroline has studied and learned her vampire history, one big chunk after each new city.

In this part of the world, turns out, the original family of vampires are a big deal among their kind. The _Mikaelescu_ of New Orleans, in America. They lived there for three hundred years, a hundred years ago—everyone knows that. But does everyone know where they came from originally? Does anybody know their roots, the earth that fed the blood of their family—of their entire race? No, they don't know that, _Caroline Forbes from America_. Most people just think they're from the New World, the _old ones_—from back then when only the Vikings had dared sail across the seas. And isn't that shame, Caroline Forbes? You come from there too, Caroline Forbes, don't you? From America? From where exactly in America? Is your hometown close or far away from the _Mikaelescu_?

Have you ever been to New Orleans, Caroline Forbes?

"_Nie_," she shrugs, tilting the green bottle of _Tyskie_ and gulping down half of it in one breath. "Never saw the point."

* * *

She tells her story to some, however.

_Never left home until I cross the pond, actually. Went to college 50 miles from my mom's backyard. _ This side of the world is different, though—a couple of decades and she has mostly lived _everywhere_ from here back to the setting sun burrowing beneath the gentle waves of the Atlantic. Her eyes and feet are always chasing the sunrise in the wee hours of the morning, the small hours of her personal _forever_.

She'll keep moving east, and hasn't yet thought that far ahead—what she'll do when she goes round, closer the circle over the globe and finds herself back home again.

* * *

Mystic Falls is exactly 867.58 miles from the French Quarter in New Orleans.

* * *

There's a voicemail, a red widget notification flickering in the top left corner of the screen. Like that first time, that morning he called her after he left the first time, to tell her about the art and the music of New Orleans, and how he could only think of her.

Every year, there is a voicemail. _Every year_.

She wishes it was as easy as believing you can trap the eternity of a ghost in a tiny, shiny electronic rectangle and never let it out. Never let it _go_.

She wishes she was strong enough to delete without hitting _play_ first. She wishes—

_Happy birthday, Caroline_.

You can have a thousand more—

She wishes she had known then all the self-control tricks she has learned over the years. She wishes she hadn't vamped out that one time she had picked up the phone and gone so crazy with anger at him and at herself that she had literally fallen mute like a dumbass in a rushed intake of breath

She wishes she had made him promise, then.

That he wouldn't call, either.

He said he would never be back and she knows she will never seen him again, so why must he _call_?

Every year, there is a voicemail.

_Happy birthday, Caroline_.

Twenty six (voicemails), and counting.

* * *

Nine hundred and seventy-four until a _thousand_, and—

—she's forgetting how to pretend that she isn't going to live forever.

* * *

**[three]**

**.-.**

She wishes she knew how to stop missing—

_No. Shush. _No_._

Caroline, _no_.

* * *

Tokyo is exactly 6860.69 miles away from New Orleans.

* * *

She's looked it up in the distance calculator app of her phone, and now can't stop staring at the numbers. 6-8-6-0-6-9

She stares at the screen until the light fades out and her phone shuts down and her sight gets blurry, and then she slides her thumb over the imaginary inverted L-shaped pattern that unblocks her screen and begins the process all over again.

The chain of unanswered texts stares right back at her.

_Come on, Care._

_It'll be fun, I promise._

_You always wanted to come, remember?_

_Turns out Damon speaks Japanese, can you believe that?_

(It's so hard not to roll her eyes at that, that it'd be silly to try and suppress the impulse. So she doesn't.)

_Caroline, come on. _

_We'll have so much fun._

_It's been too long, don't you think?_

* * *

It's _definitely_ been too long.

Fifteen years since she last saw Elena, who used to be her _other _best friend before Bonnie got married and had two girls and grew old and got a pension, and Caroline decided that she was going to need a couple of handful more of those best-friends things if she wanted to make it to the other side of an eternity—preferably, she'd need a couple of handfuls more best friends in each city that she ever chose to settle in. Temporarily.

(Caroline's always been so good at making new friends. Almost as good as she's got over the decades at packing up a bag, driving off and never looking back.)

It's been _exactly _fifteen years since Phuket, she knows.

She's developed this stupid little bad habit that she can't sake off, counting the passage of time like she's a vampire calculator. Her new (older) friends in every city always tell her she'll outgrow it, and sometimes she pretends that she actually believes them and doesn't know any better.

It hasn't even been a century yet, and she always preferred older guys with an air of mystery draped darkly over the tantalizing smirk twisting up their lips.

* * *

It's not that she doesn't miss Elena, but, you see—

She isn't going to Tokyo.

Not yet.

The official reason is, that's too far east, and there are still too many places in the middle she hasn't live in yet. She's a planner and she has a plan and she's got to stick to it.

The real reason is, it's one lonely city name in a list of three that she hasn't yet betrayed him with—but she's barely now getting ready to admit that.

She fell in love with Paris the first time her high heels slipped between the cobblestones and she fell, scratching her knee like she did all the time when she was five. She spent three nights in a row crying in Rome before she thought of buying a plane ticket for her mom.

It isn't time for Tokyo _yet_. She's not ready.

She has no wish to listen to Damon babbling in Japanese, thank you very much—so she types hurriedly, _So sorry! I wish I could, but I can't leave Port Louis right now. There's a bit of a situation here, and there's some people I really need to take care of for a while_.

* * *

She doesn't type, _see you soon_.

What's the point in lying?

She always hated lying to her friends.

But—

* * *

—later that night she wonders, bored to death by the whooshing of the waves that lap at the white beach sand. If maybe Elena would be curious to know that the distance from Tokyo to New Orleans is exactly of 6860.69 miles.

If maybe she'll look that up in her phone, too, while Damon is distracted pretending to talk to someone in Japanese, someone they have randomly picked up in the middle of the Shibuya Crossing and are planning to eat for dinner later that night. Maybe Elena is curious too, and stares at the screen (6-8-6-0-6-9) of her phone the way Caroline stares at the numbers on _her_ screen, biting her lips, only a tiny bit worried that the guy lying unconscious on her bed might have bled out a pint of blood too much before she remembered she had to either give him a taste or dig up a grave.

6860.69 miles.

Will Elena want to know, how far away Stefan is from her—_exactly_?

* * *

There were more texts that evening.

_That sucks, Care._

_Hope everything is alright._

_We've been talking of heading back home after Tokyo_.

_It'd be nice to see you there sometime._

_We've thought maybe we could go down to visit Stefan._

* * *

Caroline shut down her phone without replying, eyes closed tightly over the made-up images of bright city lights and ancient, colourful shrines.

Nine hundred and twelve birthdays still to go to a _thousand_.

Far too many, all things considered, to handle without the crutch of one last unkempt promise to hold onto.

_I'll take you_—

—he promised, that first night they danced together.

* * *

**[four]**

**.-.**

"Hey."

After she breathes out the greeting, she's forced to endure six seconds of a silence heavier than the void in her stomach.

"Caroline?"

It's a sound, a rush of breath, a memory branded in her dead _dead_ prefrontal cortex and just like that, as if by magic, her lips curl up and her eyes roll back into her head. "_You_ called me, remember?"

His low, familiar chuckle infuses a breath of life deep inside her chest, and she gasps loudly, trembling, taken by surprise as the perpetual pit in her stomach fills up, finally, with impossibly-sweet warmth, threatening to swell her like a balloon.

* * *

"You sound just like you did when I curled my—"

"Oh my god, are you being _serious_ right now?"

* * *

For a whole hour he laughs in her ear, soft and low, and just like in a fleeting flicker of dim light the universe fades as a dying star. Time erodes and disappears and the insurmountable distance melts away like a hot puff of air, crawling up her throat and bursting out of her lips in a suffocated bark of genuine laughter.

He asks _how it's been_, the first century of her eternity, and for a second or two she honestly doesn't remember, can't think of what to say.

It's been _long_, she thinks—but now that she can hear his breathing right _here_, now that she feels it hot and wet sliding down her neck, just like that morning in the woods—it feels the _opposite_ of long. It feels like no time has passed at all, and he just got back to his stupid French Quarter in his stupid New Orleans and is calling just to check up on her, annoy the living daylights out of her being all smug and self-satisfied because she had to roll up the shreds of her panties in a ball and tuck them in her pocket because _did he really have to completely destroy every piece of clothing she had on_?

* * *

Minutes go by before she thinks of telling him, about all the places she has been to, all her favourite cities she has lived in, and some of the people she has crossed ways with over the decades.

"That sounds like it's been fun," he says, time and again; meaning her _life after life_ and she wants to tell him, _it kind of was_—but instead jumps into a new story every time, a new place, a new friend she handpicked to share her endless journey for a year or two.

Doesn't let him catch his breath.

* * *

"So," she swallows the knot in her throat, braids her fingers behind the phone she's holding in front of her face. "How _busy_ is your life right now as the king of New Orleans?"

* * *

(There was a sharp, loud intake of air, and the ghost of a devilish smile being conjured up by her wild imagination before her shut-tight eyes. _Are you coming for a visit, love?_

"Nope." (She wasn't.)

But—

_I've been thinking of Tokyo_, she told him instead, her heart drumming dead in her throat. _Lately, I've been thinking of Tokyo_.)

* * *

**[five]**

**.-.**

In Bucharest, she had liked to tell people that she had actually met the original family of vampires—as a lie.

The originals, they weren't just celebrities there. They were _local_ celebrities, in the way celebrities can only be in towns and countries they have never set a foot in except in counted occasions, but the friend of a friend is sure that their mom went to school with a cousin, you know?

It was a fun game, one that had turned her into the heart of the party the way she used to be back home in only _minutes_.

She met the _Mikaelescu_ siblings once, back in America, she had said. And not just the three who live and reign in Louisiana now, nope. She had met all _five_ of them. Can you believe that?

_Get out_, they all had rolled their eyes, _no one has ever met the oldest. He died as soon as their mother turned them._

Others' protests had knocked the air off her windpipes. _No one has ever seen Klaus_, they shook their heads, wrinkled foreheads and scared eyes full of awe and disbelief.

Caroline had played it cool and only shrugged. _I did_, she lied._ I met Finn. I saw Klaus. I was dating the mayor's son in my hometown back then and the originals were in passing, so the mayor threw a party for them—they were big donors, you know? So my boyfriend, Tyler was his name—he invited me to come to the party with him, and I met all of them._

Gasps, round eyes, deferential smiles of admiration—

* * *

—and a truckload of free drinks (_if you know what she means_).

* * *

For a little while, for a little life, real memories had faded into fantasies.

And so had Caroline, dissipating into a self-made set role: any other young, impressionable vamp girl, crushing hard on a name from a legend of long ago.

* * *

Klaus thinks that story of Bucharest is particularly hilarious when she confesses over the phone. _I used to pretend I didn't know you, and then I lied and played a game of pretending that I was lying, saying I knew you so that I could feel all important and special_.

She feels the heavy, pressing caress of his chuckle, vibrating so low in his throat, scorching and yet as moist as his tongue in a vibrant memory, licking up the stretch marks along the inside of her thigh.

"You've always been such a mystery, Caroline."

* * *

Perhaps, she's been.

Perhaps, that's why she plays it _super_ cool and doesn't agree on a place to meet.

(Confession time: she's one-hundred-per-cent sure that, if she had, he would have known in a second that she'd picked their meeting point out of her electronic copy of _88 Things to Do in Tokyo_.

No need to make a complete fool of herself just yet, right?)

Instead, she decides to wait for him to come to her and count the hours it takes him to find her in the crowd.

* * *

(Four.)

* * *

Her plane lands exactly thirty seven minutes after midnight.

* * *

**[six]**

**.-.**

They find each other in the middle of a crammed, narrow street, barely minutes after the dawn, surrounded by the shaky steps of a million jet-lagged tourists, bloodshot eyes and wide-awake, numbed expressions of insomnia haunting their faces, still, a long night's journey into the chilly Tokyo morning.

People, ghosts, neither-living-nor-dead are swarming around them like ants crawling out of their nests, colourless shadows bustling, dawdling, sliding across the road while he and she stand still like in a movie cliché. Only her pale blue maxi skirt flows, caresses the flesh of her calves, awakens the muscle memory of his prying fingers sinking into her flesh, hooking up her legs, curling her ankles over his hips.

She shivers, catches his smile before she notices the deep shade of green of his eyes sparkling bright and violent beneath the pale, tender light of the sunrise.

Then, she takes one step forward, and he meets her halfway.

"Hello, Caroline."

* * *

She remembers _everything_.

It's been a fucking century, _shut up_—she's being _honest_.

She can't even wrap her head around that, anyway; that she knew him for five minutes, fucked him in a fleeting second, and every touch and kiss and caress has been branded in her lifeless flesh, sealed into her brain, drawn with indelible ink across her clammy skin.

Every _kiss_, she hasn't been able to stop thinking about.

How she just couldn't bring herself to _stop_ _kissing him_. He tried again and again to drag his mouth away and slide his tongue down her neck, the heel of his palm pushing up her breast so that if he bent his neck just so, his teeth could maybe just nibble—

But she hadn't let him. Each time she grabbed his head with such unfamiliar, unknown force, pulling his mouth back against her lips, trapping his tongue inside the snare of her teeth. He struggled using only human force, so determined not to hurt her, but insistent on his need to tear his lips away, taking merciless advantage of her momentary moment of complete oblivion when faster than she could have ever noticed, he'd slipped his fingers up the hem of panties, curled his knuckles against her flesh as he grazed her earlobe with his teeth in a rushed whisper. "I just want a taste, Caroline."

The thought of his mouth between her legs had burned her skin and frizzed her nerves, rushed a whimper off her lips—but the grip of her fingers clutching his hair was relentless. She'd barely muttered a hasty _later _as she hauled her lips over the stubble on his cheek, whining to catch his mouth again, kiss him again, kiss him again, kiss him again and again and again as his fingers thrust, plunged, pulled.

* * *

She came with the taste of his blood in her throat, his top lip trapped between her sharp teeth, a trickle of blood slipping from his mouth right down the curve her tongue.

His fingers caressed their way out of her, and she noticed that the winter sun over Virginia had never shone brighter or more yellow.

* * *

_Later_—

He got his taste.

His tongue tireless drawing tight circles into her skin, inside her flesh, teeth blunt and playful until that final, never-ending instant when he'd dragged his mouth down, two fingers pressed tight against her in the throbbing wake of his tongue as his bite ripped right into her femoral artery, four sharp fangs piercing her skin, hollow cheeks sucking out her blood as all the stars in the sky burst out of the deep purple afternoon in one bright, endless supernova.

* * *

She'd come back down from the high of his mouth and his fangs to the heat of his tongue still pressed flat against her, still urging and stroking, tireless.

The blood he'd poured off her tender, torn flesh was smeared all over his face, her thighs, her blurry vision as she gasped out her pleasure and swallowed the familiar tang of copper stuck to the back of throat, from the gulps of his blood he had let her drink before thrusting up inside her.

"Klaus…"

She whimpered, panted, cried out—swilled the familiar dark blue dusk over Mystic Falls and replaced the incoming darkness with a wail of his name being slashed off her lips—so she didn't have to look at the blackness again.

* * *

**[seven]**

**.-.**

He takes her for a stroll down the mellower corners of Yoyogi Park and, sitting on a bench, eyes still on the fountain pond, they wait out the busiest hours of the day, going on around them like they aren't there at all.

"You kept your promise," she finally says, at some point.

It hasn't been one tenth of his life, but it has been _all_ of hers, and she wonders idly if he can even recognize her anymore, now that she is _old_ and feels so world-weary and can't even remember the last time she felt anything that even remotely resembled _bubbly_.

She wonders if he wants to be here at all, with her, right now.

But then the twists his neck and catches her eyes, and he offers her a trademark smirk. Self-amused and know-it-all, unbearably welcoming and comforting in its familiarity. "You made it insufferably easy for me, love."

To _that_, she can only frown, because _what_? "I did?"

There's a soft roll of his shoulders, and immediately she feels him leaning closer, tastes the memory of his breath on her skin as tangible as if his lips were pressed to her forehead right now, whispering _goodbye, Caroline_, two steps away from the front door of the Salvatores' boarding house.

"You did, sweetheart," he explains, so gentle, almost _sad_."You never gave a place to come back to."

* * *

"Also," he smiles, later, genuinely, fingers sinfully deft around chopsticks in the hall-in-the-wall noodle shop he's thought fancy enough for lunchtime, as the movement doodles lazy, dirty thoughts all over her mischievous mind—"You never picked up the phone. Except that first time when you didn't say a _thing_."

She chuckles merrily in return, catches the glint in his eyes and maybe for a tiny nanosecond she feels even guilty. But it's been a hundred freaking years, and she's wasted enough time pretending that you can be honest _just once_ and then you get to walk out from the aftermath and make it as if it never was.

"I was trying to move on," she admits. For a hundred years, she's been trying to move on. He doesn't even need to voice out his smugness—it's so blatantly obvious, the gigantic, overwhelming dimension of her failure in that department. "I even changed my phone number a couple of times, in case you didn't notice."

His grin grows sharper and his eyes shine brighter. "I did notice, love."

Not that he'd ever let a minor little detail like a change of number deter a mastermind of evil like him, you know?

_Ugh_. She throws a chopstick at him and doesn't miss the exact middle point of his forehead. "You're such a _disgusting _creepo."

* * *

They're perched on the sky deck of his fancy hotel, the whole bright blue world sparkling frantic and luminous beneath their feet.

"How is this place so quiet?"

She doesn't know, she cannot think of the millions and millions that hustle bellow, but still takes pleasure in savouring the uncanny silence of an oddly serene, yet ceaseless crowd.

He doesn't answer, but his fingers entwine with hers over the edge of cornice. Probably he has no idea, either, of how a place can be so crammed and so silent all at once. But he does speak to the clouds only a few yards from their fingertips when he confesses, voice so low he seems afraid to disturb the all-encompassing stillness—

"It's a nice change from the rattle back home."

* * *

"Before we do this—"

"Who says we're doing—?"

"You have to know, Caroline. It's been a _hundred_ years—"

"_Almost_ a hundred years—"

"—and I have missed you _every_ day. Every day, Caroline, I have wanted—"

"Klaus—"

"I'm not walking away. Not this time. Not again. Not _ever_ am I—"

"_Klaus_—"

* * *

"_Good_," is all she needs to say so that he finally shuts his hole.

Cupping his cheeks in her hands, she tilts his head just a bit as she steps closer and kisses him. Again. Once, twice. She stops a few seconds later to catch her breath, fill up her lungs to get her rusty deadened heart ready for the strain, and then—

—she kisses him again.

* * *

**[eight]**

**.-.**

She presses her forehead to the thick window pane, watches her breath steam in weird shapes against the glass, momentarily obscuring the gray curtain of drizzle outside, almost solid as it drapes over the ancient-looking Technicolor blur of the diluted city lights. Tokyo stares right back at her, and her steaming breath catches in her lungs. She's never been higher over the surface of the earth.

She's never been farther away.

She can't help the thought—

"You know—" She doesn't remember the last time she felt this blue, tears clotting in the back of her throat, eyes stinging. "My mom isn't buried in Mystic Falls."

* * *

Her mom rests beneath a small, white-washed town in the coast of Tuscany.

Caroline had been living there, in a tiny, quiet village twenty miles south of Livorno. Her mom had come to visit her, and almost immediately fallen in love with the land, the bright green of the trees, the vibrant shade of blue of the skies. Caroline hadn't wanted her to leave, _ever_, and her mom—she understood in a way Caroline no longer could, how short infinity can sometimes be.

She had decided to stay, enjoy every bit of the food, the people, the sun—

Caroline buried her in the local churchyard.

Her mom had loved the place, and Caroline wouldn't—_couldn't_ go back home again.

* * *

Silent tears roll down her cheeks when finally she pulls her eyes away from the city that glimmers outside. She turns around to look at Klaus's peaceful, recumbent silhouette. She can't see, doesn't want to see his eyes when the questions burst out of her lips—

"Where's your daughter?"

Instantly his gaze jumps up from the notebook he's holding on his lap, but the shadows in the room do their magic and hide the expression on his face. Caroline's can't tell if maybe he's shocked or angry that she asked, but his voice, surprisingly, travels across the quiet, lifeless hotel room stronger and steadier than she could have expected.

He swallows and simply answers, "Saint Louis." She can almost spy a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders. "Walking distance from the Quarter."

* * *

The wound that particular injury might have caused, Caroline is no longer afraid of.

* * *

There are things, you see, that she has known about him all along.

Like that there was a magical baby, once upon a time. A daughter who died too young, almost eighty years ago. The mother—she was someone Caroline once knew. She died too, a long time before her child.

(She was also too young, and—)

—it was ultimately meaningless, as most things in life. Klaus's _daughter_—

—some sort of enchantment, people liked to whisper; the Spirits' design. The forces of nature scheming and conspiring to restore an age-old balance that, in truth, can never be restored again. Not in a world so putrid, so crammed with all these many, _so many_ monsters.

It was meant to change the course of the universe, the destiny of the vampire race because, they all said—it was going to remake their royalty.

* * *

(None of that ever happened, after all.

A girl was born, and two girls got killed.

Now Klaus, Elijah and Rebekah Mikaelson, the remaining originals, weave a worldwide web of boundless power, as they did once before; from a place that, they say, it's the one borrowed house they've ever called home in eleven centuries of rootless wandering.

And there's little more to it.)

* * *

_You'll love it_, he promises, as he trails kisses down her chest and tells her stories of the music, the seafood, the _humafood_, and the magic that flows thick as blood through the narrow streets, falling off the baroque balconies in bucketfuls, like enchantments and willing tourists were inexpensive Mardi Gras trinkets.

* * *

"You're such a dork," she mocks him later, from her favourite spot on the window bench. "I can't believe you're drawing me."

_Again_, she thinks. On cheap hotel paper and using a freaking plastic _pen_ this time, but enthralled and devoted to the task—so much so that there's no awkwardness left, no remains of an invisible but suffocating fog clotting the room after their brief talk of dead and buried relatives. His smile, instead, looks almost _cute_; childlike and deceptively innocent when he catches her eyes beneath the orange glint of the lamplight. "Couldn't resist, love. You're so lovely, and you must know—I've been drawing from memory alone for a very, _very_ long time."

In response, she snorts and rolls her eyes. She'd be fooled by his blameless smile if she couldn't still smell from where she's sitting the blood of their sushi accompaniment (also known as their _waiter) _coating every pore of his skin. But that's not a reason not to smile back, she figures, so she nods, unusually complacent, and holds her chin up so her profile is shaped more elegantly against the sparkling, multi-coloured darkness of the city night.

"Okay."

* * *

_A million years later_—

She tugs at the long sleeves of his shirt, pulling them down over her curled up knees as she wiggles her toes, rolling her shoulders to ease off the tension that has caught in the sore, dead-cold muscles of her back. Posing, turns out, is boring as _hell_.

"Can't you draw faster? Like, using your super vampire speed?"

His low chuckle and the dimpled corners of smile make her long for the huge, comfy hotel bed like _you have no idea_.

"It hasn't been ten minutes, Caroline."

No, she wants to say. It's been _a million years_. But the way her name rolls out of his lips, so languidly; his tongue so intentionally, yet so casually curling around the last syllable,_ ugh_—

Even her sass gets suffocated somewhere deep in chest, and she finds herself completely mute. All she can do is stretch her legs over the window bench deliberately, baring her thighs with the movement as seductively as she can manage.

* * *

It works.

* * *

"Come here," he calls, _at last_; so quietly that she's sure she only hears him thanks to her super-powerful vampire hearing.

It's her turn to feel like a dork, too, crawling stupidly across the bed to sit beside him, her shoulder resting on the headboard as she stares intently at him. She wants to kiss him, she really truly does; but as her eyes make out the familiar glimmer of green tinting his look of adoration, a knot ties suddenly around her throat, pulling tight and hard. It's a struggle to let the words out when they clutter on the tip of her tongue, but she paints an old, chipper smile around the effort.

"You know what I've figured out?" She speaks quietly, like it's a secret. "_Never_ doesn't mean anything when you're immortal—" Because _never is a promise_, as they say, and—"There's no expiration date, so how are you supposed to keep that kind of promise?"

It's taken her a century to wrap her mind around the endless intricacies of _forever_, but the way he smiles at her now, his arm circling her waist to pull her closer—it makes every minute of loneliness worth it, she thinks.

His voice is wet and deep like a kiss when he raises his eyebrows suggestively at her. "Isn't that liberating, love?"

* * *

"But you said _never_," she protests, the memory so real, so present, so indelible. He said she would _never_ see him again, and somehow they both thought, or pretended to think, that there was _freedom_ in their inexplicable, premature sadness. "Did you think that was possible, that maybe we'd never—"

Her words trail off, slip unsaid off her lips; but he catches them quickly with a quick kiss to her forehead, like that morning-turned-night of long ago. "I needed to let you come to me, Caroline."

_I needed_—

It's funny how he phrases that, the ever unapologetic egomaniac sociopath that he is.

How fucked-up is it, anyway, that it sends a rush of affection coursing warm and electrical through her veins? What he said, what he did—he won't pretend it was for her sake, her growth, her independence, her immature heart that needed seasoning and hardening. In the end, for her as well, it's a whole lot easier to understand the lifelong separation if she frames it inside her head as one more incurable symptom of a thousand-year condition made up entirely of violence-and-mayhem-sublimated insecurities and _that many_ abandonment issues.

It gives her the upper hand, if only momentarily, and the sufficient lightness of heart to throw a joke, a smirk of her own twisting up her lips. "So _I_ came to you, huh?"

"Well, you picked up the phone, love," he laughs in her ear, his nose nuzzling her neck as his hand snakes beneath the hem of her borrowed shirt.

She laughs, too—because it _tickles_. Because, after all—_so much for letting her go_, letting her come to him. It had to be her choice, her terms—but his choice, his terms, too. She asked him to come here, but he picked the final destination a hundred years ago.

* * *

A wave of spine-tingling nostalgia overcomes her when she recalls her younger days, his fancy parties, a breathtaking diamond bracelet and only the first of _a thousand birthdays_.

Nine hundred and two still to go—

It's only the beginning, she knows. _A thousand more birthdays_, and it's only the beginning.

There is no middle and _there will be no end_.

* * *

Morning crawls closer when, exhausted, she buries her head in the crook of his neck, shivering as she feels the warmth of his hand pressed so tightly against the small of her back.

"Let's go home," she whispers into his chest, yawning as the first mauve lights of the rising sun begin to creep through the glass ceiling over the terrace. "Tomorrow."

It's only now that Tokyo wakes that Caroline allows herself to close her eyes, cling to the man that shares her bed, her eternity—and hope to dream of the old-friend monsters that await at the other end of the world.

(6-8-6-0-6-9)

"Tomorrow?"

His low voice reaches her muddled consciousness from a place of far and long ago, as so many other nights over the course of her still life. It's disquieting, that particular memory, so she presses her nose closer to the cotton of his shirt, takes in the now familiar essence of soap and blood and _sushi_, and smiles loudly when she realizes that this is the first city she's ever been that she won't stay in. This time, she won't make up a ready-made cardboard house with her own hands, where she can pretend a home is not a place she'll ever need.

"Tomorrow," she repeats, her tongue stuttering over the weight of sleep and contentment that thickens her voice.

* * *

**.end**

**Thanks for reading guys! Hope you liked it!**


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